Kelvin Hall

Discover what's on at this Glasgow landmark

The Numbers

9

Audience groups

90

Years of history

1.5M

Objects

The Challenge

Kelvin Hall is a building steeped in history. After a devastating fire that saw the original structure rebuilt, the Glaswegian landmark re-opened in 1927 as an exhibitions venue. In its 90 years, it has hosted music gigs, major sporting events and for a time was home to Glasgow's Museum of Transport.

The current redevelopment of the venue has seen Glasgow City Council partner with Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums/Glasgow Sport), the University of Glasgow and the National Library of Scotland. The aim of the project was to create an exciting centre of cultural excellence providing collections' storage, teaching and research, alongside a state-of-the-art Glasgow Club health and fitness centre under one roof.

With the new, extensive offerings provided after Kelvin Hall's transformation and the 9 target audiences they had identified, Glasgow Life required a website that would inform prospective visitors about the variety of services on offer, the bustling events calendar, and booking options.

The Objectives

One Stop Shop

The website needed to provide prospective visitors with all the answers to their questions before they arrive at Kelvin Hall. This should include information on the fitness facilities and the programme of exhibitions. It should also host booking systems for guided tours and exhibitions taking place.

Promoting the Collections Portal

Kelvin Hall would soon be home to 1.5 million objects from the Hunterian and Glasgow Museums' collections. With such a dynamic variety of collections housed in the one building, the Collections Portal would provide online access to key information about current displays for those interested in Kelvin Hall's new cultural offerings.

Connecting Databases

We needed to provide a user-friendly solution that integrated the website with Glasgow Life's events databases. This would require displaying upcoming events with a search filter function and ticket booking functionality.

User Experience and Design

The Kelvin Hall website posed a particularly interesting challenge with regards to the sheer number of user groups and their unique requirements from the website. It needed to be responsive and extensive in its information architecture, to ensure it could host all the necessary information its users might require. Our user experience and content teams, with their combined expertise in information architecture, content and user journeys, were able to create a solution that satisfied all user needs and produced a website that was easily navigable.

Development

Integrating the Glasgow Life events databases was a challenge our technical team was ready to tackle. With previous experience in integrating external feeds within websites, we understood the benefits of automating these updates; namely removing the need for continual administration to this part of the website. Our team was able to link Glasgow Life's event database internal systems to identify upcoming events being hosted at Kelvin Hall and pull those through to the website automatically.

As well as communicating with the external Glasgow Life site, the team were able to set up a communication stream between Umbraco and SharePoint to display fitness classes being held in Kelvin Hall. Umbraco was then set up, by fitness class names, to identify imagery and other extra information not provided by SharePoint.

To allow for future development and expansion of the website as more information needs to be displayed, we knew our technical team’s knowledge of the content management system Umbraco 7 would be best suited to building this website. It provides a sturdy template which is both user friendly and could be moulded to meet the needs of the Kelvin Hall website and will allow for the flexibility needed in future expansion.

Kelvin Hall

If you're ready to transform an attraction, increase footfall and deliver integrated services, get in touch and we can discuss your requirements.